To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools ed. by William Sturkey and Jon N. Hale (review)

To Write in the Light of Freedom: The Newspapers of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools is an edited volume of primary source material drawn from Freedom School newspapers produced during Freedom Summer in 1964. Editors William Sturkey and Jon N. Hale have gathered articles, essays, and poems written by Freedom Summer students in eleven communities across Mississippi. The text provides students, teachers, and scholars with access to a collection of sources that have invaluable insights about local civil rights campaigns as viewed from the perspective of Freedom Summer students themselves.

An introduction grounds the collection in the long grassroots struggle to gain access to educational opportunity and equity in the state of Mississippi. Sturkey and Hale also emphasize the connection between education and social activism in the black freedom struggle by tracing the influence of the Highlander Folk School and the Citizenship Schools initiative. The editors highlight the pedagogical intentions of Freedom School organizers, connecting those intentions to this project by noting the central importance “of expressive critical thinking” in the educational curriculum offered to students (p. 32). Student newspapers provided Freedom School students with an outlet to develop writing skills and to share and assimilate knowledge gained about African American history, culture, and literature emphasized in other parts of the curriculum. Students used the newspapers to develop a critique of systemic racism in Mississippi and to commit themselves to movement activism. The excerpts provided from the newspapers provide insight into “the intellectual liberation” of students as expressed in their own words (p. 45).

To Write in the Light of Freedom is organized into chapters focused on a particular Freedom School publication and presented in alphabetical order by community of origin. Each chapter is prefaced with a brief description of local community organizing, includes editorial notes on the unique strengths and features of individual newspapers, and contains student work from one or more issues of the publication. This book would be more useful as a research resource if the archival locations of specific newspapers and issues were provided. The editors note that the materials gathered in the collection were located in a wide range of repositories, but the transcribed materials contained in the text are not annotated. Nevertheless, this unprecedented collection of primary source materials from the Freedom School newspapers will be a powerful teaching tool, particularly for high school and college students. As the editors note, the book “offers contemporary youths a unique opportunity to learn about the Civil Rights Movement from the perspectives of people their own age and connect it to their lives today” (p. 46).